Judith Bruder, like so many women, has lived a variety of lives, often to her own [...] college campuses she is a writer, a lecturer, and a scholar; a graduate of Wellesley College who has been a campus minister at Fordham University in Manhattan. At home she is a wife, mother, grandmother, and most recently, an unwilling widow. Brooklyn-born and Long Island bred, Judy loves foreign languages, knows a smattering of many, and feels at home around the world. Her interests range from English Literature and addictions counseling to cooking techniques, French conversation, mystery novels and the [...] knows two religious traditions from the inside out. She was raised as a devout, believing Jew. Her first novel, Going to Jerusalem (Simon & Schuster, 1979), offered a funny, quirky, modern-day Jewish pilgrimage to the land of Israel. Then the unthinkable happened, as she found herself unexpectedly and irrevocably embarking on a spiritual journey that eventually led her to become a Roman [...] told that story in her second book, Convergence (Doubleday, 1992), about which Book-of-the-Month Club wrote: "Moving, funny, and poignant, Convergence is an autobiography of rare candor and depth."Currently Judy is dwelling in the Country of Old, in a retirement community in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. She rarely ventures beyond it, but gratefully and delightedly receives many visitors, old friends and new, a modern-day anchoress, or so it pleases her to think. She has also been freshly revitalized by the addition of a great-granddaughter, Casey, who is a pistol!